COLUMBIA, SC.—Every day, Ethan Pait drove his green Chevy four-door pickup to Ronald Rouse’s house to pick him up and take him to school. Every day, the two piled back into the truck after football practice and drove home together. Rouse’s 6-4, 320-pound frame filled the cab and his outsized personality spilled out the windows. The teammates became close friends in those rides around Hartsville in rural South Carolina.

They talked in the truck, they laughed in the truck, they danced in the truck. Well, Rouse danced. Rouse danced everywhere, and on powder puff night, a few days before he died, the bed of Pait’s Chevy looked like a trampoline the way Rouse was bouncing on it. “That’s the last, best memory, seeing him dance on the back of Ethan’s truck,” says Bree Johnson, Ethan’s girlfriend.

The passenger seat is empty on those trips to and from school now, but Rouse is still very much riding shotgun. Pait, who served as a pallbearer in Rouse’s funeral, put stickers with Rouse’s name all over his truck, to ensure he never forgets his friend. He never could anyway, of course. Rouse was too effervescent, his death too shocking. The stickers serve as visual reinforcement of the lessons Pait learned from his all-too-brief friendship with the young man who wanted to be a preacher.

This is what Pait thinks when he sees the stickers: “Be reminded every day to do your best, because it might be your last. You never know.”

Pait is 16.

He sounds 61.

Nobody should learn those lessons as young as he did.

Nobody should learn them the way he did.

***

It was Hartsville’s homecoming game, and there were thousands of fans in the stands. Rouse, a defensive lineman, signaled for a timeout, then collapsed on the field.

Four doctors and two trainers rushed onto the field. They removed Rouse’s helmet, shoulder pads and shirt. They performed CPR and revived him. He walked off the field. On the sideline, Rouse talked to his father. He collapsed again. This time, doctors used a defibrillator but couldn’t revive him.

Rouse was taken by ambulance to Carolina Pines Medical Center, where he died in the emergency room. An autopsy determined the cause of death was sudden cardiac arrhythmia brought upon by a congenital enlarged heart. Rouse was the third Hartsville High School student to die in six months.

***

There is crying in football.

There was that night

And there is tonight.

It’s Saturday night at Williams-Brice Stadium on the University of South Carolina campus. The Hartsville Red Foxes have just defeated Union County, 62-27 to win the South Carolina state championship, not quite two months after Rouse died. They never lost (15-0) and rarely trailed all season. To play football while carrying grief was hard enough. To play football so well—Hartsville’s postseason margin of victory was 27.6 points—left many of those who witnessed it speechless. This is a great team. But not that great.

Hartsville High School principal Charlie Burry—a veteran of eight state title game appearances as an assistant coach and principal—choked up before the game even started as he saw cheerleaders hold up a banner with Rouse’s No. 74 painted in angels wings. “The win beneath our wings,” it said before players ran through it as they stormed the field.

On Friday, Burry spoke eloquently of the days after Rouse’s death. The first day of school after Rouse died remains frozen in Burry’s memory and always will be. In between 1st and 2nd hours, he heard something he had never heard in his 40 years in public education (35 at Hartsville): silence. Students going from class to class said nothing to each other.

Now, the game over, the trophy ceremony complete. Burry looks like he just stepped off of a broken roller coaster. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said.

Parents in the stands cried with happiness and relief and sadness and exhaustion. “I’m just so overwhelmed,” said Elizabeth Hance, whose son Ryan plays tight end. “Just to see the tragedy on the field that night. You can just still hear those boys crying when (coach) Jeff (Calabrese) told them what happened. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever experienced.”

As she spoke, hundreds of Hartsville fans stood behind the bushes that line Williams-Brice Stadium. One by one, the players walked the line, shaking hands with and hugging the fans.

In the end zone under the giant screen, Hartsville players danced with joy.

Hance wiped tears from her right cheek.

“Just finding a way to make it through,” Hance says. “It’s just incredible how these boys bonded.”

The run to the state championship hasn’t made any of the pain go away. The players and their fans and the town are still mourning. By resuming its season, the football team uncovered and revealed pain because the games forced the team’s fans to be together as opposed to staying at home with their grief. What could they talk about other than their heavy hearts? But pain shared is pain fought.

Over and over again, people at Saturday’s game called Hartsville a big family brought closer by this searing tragedy. For decades, the football team has provided the framework around which countless deep and abiding relationships have been built. Through those relationships Hartsville’s perseverance has manifested itself.

***

“The 1981 season has nothing on us! We’re 15-0!” This is Ethan Pait teasing his dad, Terry. Terry played on the 1981 Hartsville team that won the state championship. Terry, who played tight end, says his team won the championship game, 7-0, on a 70-yard touchdown run on the last play of the game.

Saturday’s game long over, Terry and Ethan Pait posed for photographs with three other father-son pairs who won state championships for Hartsville. They sat with the state championship trophy in the stands in the opposite end zone from where players danced earlier.

Ethan Pait was still wearing his pads and his No. 65 jersey. His hair was a sweaty, matted mess. He had a rip on his ear lobe and scratches on his forehead. His heart was simultaneously broken and bursting. “Every emotion you can think of,” he says. “Happy, excited, relieved, fulfilled.”

He talked a little football. He started at nose tackle. Last week, in the semifinal, he helped engineer a season-saving goal line stand in the fourth quarter. Today, his big play was a block on a 91-yard interception return for a touchdown by linebacker Fisher Payne, whose dad also played on the 1981 team and was nicknamed Dr. Death. “When I hit him, I felt his straps come loose,” Ethan Pait says.

He says playing football never seemed normal after Rouse died. It might never be again. “I feel like now I’ve got someone watching over me, protecting me, looking out for me,” he says.

***

On the night Rouse died, grief ripped through Terry Pait just like it ripped through Ethan Pait and everyone in the stands. Rouse was like a brother to Ethan, and Terry was glad for their relationship because Rouse was a positive mentor for his son. “It feels like your heart is torn out of you,” Terry Pait says.

Terry Pait’s shock left him unable to decide what to do after Rouse was taken from Hartsville’s Kellytown Stadium in an ambulance. Should he stay at the field? Should he go to the hospital? He drove to the hospital. He drove back to the field. Back to the hospital. Back to the field. For half an hour, he couldn’t make up his mind where to go or what to do.

The same indecisiveness hit many fans once the team started playing again, a week later. Should they mourn? Should they cheer? The tension between those two seeming disparate emotions never went away. The only way to resolve that tension, Terry Pait decided, was not to try. He mourned and cheered at the same time. The cheering ended with a crescendo on Saturday night. The mourning continues.